A Lost Moment in Time: The Forgotten Man on the Porch

By Craig: While the world endures hurricanes, earthquakes, threats of nuclear war and murders by gun violence, I can sit and marvel at the absurdity of it all. Hurricanes and earthquakes are nothing new. I have experienced both...well that is if you consider a typhoon the same thing as a hurricane. It is merely a matter of semantics. By no means do I mean to trivialize these catastrophic events. I only mention them to put them in perspective as they relate to time. How many people today remember the Johnstown flood? (none) or the Hurricane of 1938? (very few) Even the memory of more recent tragedies like Hurricane Hugo in 1989 is slowly being swallowed by time. One would have to be in his or her early thirties to have a memory of it. One day the same thing will be said of the recent catastrophes in Turkey and Brazil. Those places will recover, and the events will slowly amalgamate into the past with the rest of Father Time's ghostly memories. The people that experienced them will tell their children of the hardships that they endured. Truth will be speckled with embellishment and the stories will eventually pass from living memory into a footnote in history. Why was that recent protest about? Did it really matter? Ramble...Ramble...Ramble...Then there is the man on the porch...

The black and white photograph is so old that it seems to be crumbling inward from the perimeter towards the center. Of course, the condition was not helped much by the fact that it spent nearly half a century in a moldy box in the damp basement of my grandmother's house. The photo was taken some time in the early 20th century. If I were to make an educated guess, I would say it was snapped during the Coolidge administration. A nice white house is the subject of the photo. The shutters seem old and in need of repair. Ivory climbs up the side of the porch. I cannot say if it is a front porch or a back porch. Then, in the shadows under the overhang, sits a man. Who is he? What is he doing? 

I cannot tell. Time and living memory have erased anything about this photograph. I only know that my 80-year-old father, who is now suffering with the advanced stages of Parkinson's disease and dementia found the photograph, along with dozens more in his mother's basement back in 1988. Some of the photographs were stuck together.  Only a few were spared the ill effects of time. Some of them were wholly obliterated by mold. My father, when he was younger, thought the man in the photograph might be his Great-Grandfather Anders Jacobsen, a Danish immigrant farmer who died in 1924, or possibly one of his sons. My grandmother never would say. If she knew, she died with the secret. Not that it matters. The man in the photograph has long ago given up his mortal cares. He now survives, hidden in the dark shadows of a porch of a rustic farmhouse, tethered to existence by the obsessive inquiry of a man who may or may not be his great-great grandson. 

"I once existed," he calls out from the past. "Don't forget me!" 

Is he calling out in Danish or English? Perhaps both? 

The haunting photograph will linger in my memory until one day I too shall succumb to time's inevitable calling.